Sax Appeal: Vote Now In The Saxxy Awards

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Depending on how much fibreglass you ate as a child you may or may not remember that the last two weeks saw Valve encouraging people to use Team Fortress 2’s new editing suite to submit videos in a whopping twenty different categories. The deadline for this competition is long gone but the fun is just beginning, as now anyone with a Steam account can start judging those videos via this very link.
You pick a category, the page produces two videos and you say which is better. Simple! The quality of the videos might, ah, that is to say, the videos are often not of the calibre that you might expect from a human being with an actual brain, but every so often you might find a good one. Being good sports, PC Gamer have are collecting the best ones they find here, and I’ve been having a fair bit of luck in the “Most Pwnage” category. This one made me chuckle.

I spent quite some time voting a few days ago when this opened up and this is horribly, horribly true—especially the very last one. I clicked “ineligable” more than “VOTE”, and that’s despite putting in at least one vote in each category. :/

I love the editor and the idea of seeing plenty more of hilarious tf2 clips soon, but it’s a shame so many servers have the option disabled. Seems like setting up stuff on a private server is the best way to do this, which of course kind of beats the idea of the contest. :( Well, for many of the categories that is.

Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of ‘ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!

It’s certainly not something I’d play anymore, but it’s clearly still doing well or there’d be no sense putting out new hats for it. Some people clearly enjoy the game it’s become, let ’em have their fun I say. It’s not like there’s a shortage of multiplayer shooters.

Still don’t understand the obsession with hats, either way. They’re fun, but I don’t feel especially compelled to collect them. And they don’t ruin the silhouettes of the characters, so what’s the problem with them?

I’m sorry, but we seem unable to hear you over the sound of us throwing enormous handfuls of cash at Robin Walker as he performs the sinful Dance of the Seven Veils at the edge of our platinum-edged golden swimming pool filled with the warm, soothing delight that only gallons of cloned dodo amniotic fluid can provide.

@ Daniel Rivas:
To be fair, many of them look particularly stupid and thus make the game look stupid. This is a crime, since TF2 was, notably, the least stupid-looking game ever made. However, and that’s in bold letters, if hats and goofy weapons are the lubricant that keeps the updates coming out and the game breathing, then hats and goofy weapons are to be celebrated.

Don’t get the hate TF2 gets around these parts by few people. I don’t play much nowadays either, because I’ve played the game consistently since it was released (as well as because the vast majority of servers being 32-player instant respawn.) Why there is such bile against something that is purely cosmetic I really have no idea. I can get the complaints about the weapons not being anywhere near as balanced and a lot harder to know what the opponent has, but it’s not like the original weapons are totally obsolete.

I’m revisiting the game, having not played it seriously since the hat & microtransaction updates. My first impression was irritation as I found the game I once enjoyed now buried beneath a bunch of ancilary bullcrap. Then I got over it. The end.

“My first impression was irritation as I found the game I once enjoyed now buried beneath a bunch of ancilary bullcrap. Then I got over it. The end.”

I had practically the same reaction when they announced the item store. Yet I’m still playing it practically every evening. Why? Well it’s a bloody good game that’s why & once you get over yourselves you realise the cosmetic stuff just encourages the tomfoolery TF2 embodies.
Also you don’t have to spend a single penny in the item store to enjoy the game as the vast majority of new weapons are generally inferior to the default ones & the ones actually worth having you will get from just playing the game either through random drops or achievement rewards.

I think Vandelay hits the nail much closer to the head, with mentioning the fast respawn 32ppl server which seems to be a semi-enforced standard these days.

Now that, really fucks with the game, the hats… uhm, well, never even got one, but I really am not bothered, and I don’t mind having a bit of silly variety added in, as the game never wanted to look realistic or.. .well, not-silly.

Echoing that the biggest threat to TF2 – overcrowded, fast-spawn servers – is the creation of the community. Hats, the creation of Valve, just encourage people to wear silly headwear, which is funny and harmless.

Anyone who threw a tantrum over hats without ever looking at the horrible, HORRIBLE things that server admins and the players that call for it have done to the game really is blinkered.

I say this with no investment, as I haven’t played TF2 in a couple of years now and wouldn’t have any desire to go back even if all the hats disappeared or what-have-you, but isn’t it possible there’s a connection between the type of community the game has these days (which causes these problems you mention) and the shift in tone and target audience represented by the microtransactions?

@Vinraith: Nah, that’s pretty much just every PC multiplayer shooter with console variables ever. If there’s any respawn time at all, no matter how balanced and how small, there will be servers that remove it. Who cares if it totally screws up the game balance and makes defending/attacking (depending on the map) infinitely harder?

@Dominic White: There’s still a decent amount of vanilla 24 player servers. I have a bunch of servers like that in my favorites, and most of them usually have players in them. Also, there’s an option in the server browser to filter by player count.

PCGamer. Minimal admin mods and a bit crash-prone, but good skill level and no funny business.
Hampshire Heavies: Very professionally run, up to date and effectively admined servers.
Nervous Energy Community: Often runs a small number of good custom maps in rotation (had frontier before it became official for example). Has a couple of silly peripheral mods, but no funny business for core gameplay.

I’d add Uberium to CMaster’s list of servers worth playing on. Have seen a few of the RPS commenters on there (such as LionsPhil above & Man Raised by Puffins being 2 I’ve noticed regularly amongst others).

To be fair to VALVe when you join a 32 player server the game does warn you now that it’s more than the game was designed for & they have their server scoring system which drops terrible servers from the master list so the only people to blame for perpetually full 32-man instant respawn 24/7 dustbowl/goldrush/badwater are the players who play on them (well and the admins who set them up in the first place but if the servers were empty they’d change them or shut them down I expect).

You can complain about fast respawn Servers all you want, but Valve never rebalanced the official spawn times. Maybe 20 seconds makes sense for competition, but in a 12 v12 pubs where the other team has moveable level three teleporters made with a fast building wrench and lots of new ways to quick kill helpless opponents ( jarate+bushwacka, flamethrower + axetinguisher, kritzkrieg+ almost anything, Ullapool caber, criting demo with melee from the targe, minicrits from many things, sandman…) .

The game changed and Valve never addressed those changes in the “official” default respawn times for maps. Personally I think 10-15 seconds on defense is about as high as it should go. 25 second respawns I sometimes encounter make me want to quit as I only have one life before the entire map is gone…and as I pointed out…it is harder now to avoid insta-death skillfully.

Insta-respawn is broken, 32 players is broken. But Valve should reconsider all the mechanics they have introduced if they are going to force default respawns.